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post-it 3 hours ago

At 3 GHz, a signal can travel at most 10 cm per clock cycle. You can't really physically scale a chip up.

jasonwatkinspdx 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You can you just have to use a tiled architecture. And microprocessors already have far shorter wiring distances than the simple speed of light calculation because it takes time for the gates to make the transition as well.

With processors it's customary to use the "Fan out of 4" metric as a measurement of the critical paths. It's the notional display for a gate with fan out of 4, which is the typical case for moving between latches/registers. Microprocessor critical paths are usually on the scale of ~10 FO4.

The largest chip at the moment is Cerebras's wafer scale accelerator. There the tile is basically at the reticule limit, and they worked with TSMC to develop a method to wire across the gaps between reticules.